THAT February 22 of 1910, when I re-entered Paris and the world of war, was a period of tense, hidden drama, re-echoing the louder drama of Verdun. To the group of correspondents who had hurried back to Europe from a rest at home the great battle was not wholly unexpected. Nothing about this war has been so paradoxical as the secrecy of its minor tactics and the glaring publicity of its grand strategy. Any large movement involves, long and huge preparation. Ten thousand pairs of shrewd eyes behold the signs and where there are eyes there are tongues. Now in this case, informed people among the Germans in the United States had been saying ever since Christmas that the Allies would never take the initiative on the Western front. Early, very early, in the year, the Germans would begin a "drive on Paris." One hears many and strange things about the great war; the reporter, picking up fragments of information along its edges proceeds in time on the principle that any report, however bizarre, may be true, and that any seemingly authentic statement, however well backed, may be false. Parallel with a situation so great and new and strange that its events transcend imagination runs an insane tendency toward rumour. Nevertheless, these forecasts of an early German initiative were so persistent that some of us changed our plans at the eleventh hour and sailed not to England but directly to the Continent. I opened my newspaper, that first morning in Paris, and behold the expected had arrived! The bald official communiqué had departed for once, from guarded language. As formally worded as ever, it conveyed a feeling that its author was writing under strain. A bombardment of "unheard of intensity" had opened before Verdun---the very point where any of us amateur café-strategists would have deemed the thrust least likely. The instantaneous French imagination grasped the fact in all its significance. This was the greatest German movement on the Western front since the twin battles of Ypres and of Flanders locked the line in 1914. There followed for the people of Paris, and for all who loved France, a curious week---tense, a little anxious, at times miserable.

Jump with the news of Verdun arrived a season of the worst weather that Paris has known for ten years ---cold, wet winds followed by something that, for France, amounted to a blizzard. The ten inches of snow alternately thawed and froze. At intervals rain came down on the mess---a gentle rain, but searching and cold. Paris got out its stocks of old, heavy clothes and shivered. Coal was in such demand for munitions manufacture as to make its price nearly prohibitive for the poor, and expensive even for the well-to-do. The Parisian hotels and pensions have no heating arrangements. even in the best of times, for such weather as this. We shivery Americans, accustomed to those tropical interiors which are the jest of the European, ordered up wood fires and clustered close about their hearths.

All through the worst of this weather---which scarcely changed for the better during the first vital fortnight of the battle---there came official reports from the line which might be taken as encouraging or discouraging, according to one's individual temperament. The French had fallen back to a new line. The Germans were in Douaumont Fort, but surrounded there. A few days of this, and the whole atmosphere began to change for the better. The communiqués were no more hopeful than in the beginning; yet somehow the newspapers seemed to reflect a new confidence in the people.

It is not hard to account for this. Newspapers are not the only medium for the transmission of news, in fact. the human race, until a hundred years ago, got its information without them. Officers, relieved for special duty, came out of that hell only a hundred and fifty miles from our doors to report that what the communiqués said was true. The line had reformed itself and was standing firm in the reserve trenches. The Brandenburgers, the Berserks of Germany, had taken Douaumont Fort; yet what was it but a hillock after all? The heights above Verdun, what with German dead, looked as though a whole autumn of green-grey leaves had fallen on the snow. Soldier letters straggled back through the censorship, bearing the same news. The word passed from mouth to mouth; each letter reached a thousand people.

Visitors arriving from London, where the German end of the news gets rather freer circulation, reported that Germany had heard of a "state of panic" in Paris. If this were panic, I should like to see the French in a state of calm. Life went its usual sober way. It was not a gay Paris, though infinitely more cheerful than a year before; but it was, nevertheless, almost normal. On the most miserable days you could find Frenchmen, wrapped up to the ears, sitting at the tables of the out-of-door cafés and following the immemorial French method of taking the air. If attendance at the theatres and cinemas was smaller than usual, it could easily be laid to the weather. There was not much life in the cafés, but that had been true all winter, or ever since Paris enforced the law forbidding cafés to serve spirituous liquors to women. No; all in all, Paris was as calm all through those days of crisis as any city I had seen since the war. The truth is that even the Germans at the gates would not create a panic in Paris. The French went through all that once in the anguished days before the Battle of the Marne---and even then here was no real panic.

Yet through it all ran a quiet tension which had nothing to do, I am convinced, with the fortunes of war nor with the safety of the city. The faces which glanced past you on an underground train were staring and set. Drop into a café; there would sit a family group, trying to make the best they could of these times. You would see the women, when they dropped out of the conversation, looking out with unseeing eyes---just thinking. During those first two days---being an incurable and constitutional tourist---I: travelled about, guide-book in hand, renewing acquaintance with Notre Dame, St. Etienne du Mont, St. Eustache, and some of the other beautiful old churches which I had half forgotten since I last came. I still feel about those visits as though I had intruded rudely upon private matters which were none of my business ; for all day the churches were half full ; all day the shrines of the Virgin were fringed with women and old men, their attitudes showing an intensity of anxiety and of despair.

Two or three groups stand out in memory. There was, for example, one heroic-size statue of the Virgin, set without pedestal close to the floor. Worshippers by scores knelt about it, their heads bowed almost to the floor. Closest of all were two women and one young man. Crowded up against the statue, they were pressing hands and foreheads against the cold marble of the Virgin's sculptured robes. Again, there was a glimpse of a middle-aged woman, kneeling in a far recess of St. Eustache, her face in her hands and her figure shaken with sobs.

Still, as you watched the French, you realized that these people were not worrying and praying over the fear of the invader. France has too much faith in her army for that. The better-informed official element----I know now---felt that it was touch and go during that first week that any night the Teuton hordes might roll through to Verdun. But the people maintained their confidence. What obsessed them was a personal dread lest the black chance of the grim German widowmakers might have fallen on their own. For some knew. in advance of the battle, that their sons or husbands were already at Verdun; and all that any corps of the French Army might be shifted at any time to the point of attack.

Yet I should not describe Paris, even in the darkest days of the Verdun action, as a city of tears, but rather as a city of unshed tears. 1 fancy that in the exercise of her religion alone the wonderfully heroic, wonderfully human, and wonderfully subtle Frenchwoman gives way. A Franco-American woman who knows the French better than I can ever hope to know them said to me:

"They can't cry. It is just too much for tears. They are working feverishly. Every woman among them is doing the job of three women. They try to wear themselves out so that they may sleep. But it's no use. They lie awake and think---and can't cry. "But," she added, "talk to one of them about quitting and closing up this war before Germany is beaten---and she'll want to scratch your eyes out."

The miraculous thing about France, in this war, is her ability to fight as nation never fought before, and still to indulge the luxury of being human. She feeds on no sugared, newspaper-made illusions about the blessings of war. She makes no pretence of liking the calamity which a dynastic ambition has thrust upon her. She throws no sentimental poses before the contemplation of her own fortitude. But she is probably all the stronger because she looks facts in the face, as the French, for all their emotional overlay, have a habit of doing.

Underneath everything, as I watched the days come and go in that curious world, I perceived how rightly this woman spoke concerning the mighty labours of the French woman. It was a city of work. In work lies salvation. Whether they belonged to the native element the foreign, people were ashamed not to be doing something for France. Naturally I know the American colony in Paris better than the French, and so I speak of them first yet much that I say of them applies also to the natives. They are for the most part wealthy or well-to-do, and before the war they were an idle set. But now, I found women who had never before worked with their hands picking gauze in the bandage-rooms of the hospitals, or " cleaning up " after nurses in the wards. I found women who never before managed anything but their households working ten hours a day running ouvroirs. Women who once had nothing to do in life but entertain would invite you to dinner with a little air of apology. "You know," one said, "we have set apart Saturday night for our friends---we must relax a little!"

If the Americans were working so, how much more the French! Two readjustments were going forward even then ; the readjustment of France to a state of war was not quite finished, and the readjustment to a state whose difficulties we see only darkly---the trying period after the war had just begun. Both called for service of the hands and the brain.

The economic and social situation which brought forth all this voluntary effort was so curious in February 1916 that I despaired at the time of running a thread of thought through it ; nor has it in the least clarified some eight or nine months later, as I finish these lines. France has everything in the war; not even Germany, I suppose, has directed so much energy toward the final end of victory. But even this greatest of wars has not served to alter the general form of the economic and social structure. Even if it wished to do so, a nation could not wholly change from capitalism to socialism in the midst of a war. Those war-measures which the conservative denounce as "socialistic" form, after all, only a tiny item in the whole balance. Were Paris besieged now, as she was in 1870, there would doubtless be, in all the want and misery, some persons who "profited by the war" ; it is the way of the modern world. And so, even when France is doing all that may be expected of a state and nation, certain classes of business are very prosperous. The firms who were ready, when the war broke, to manufacture munitions, would be returning enormous dividends did not the all-powerful military dictatorship step in to prevent. Lyons, the great silk-weaving district of the South, has suffered much from the mobilization of its male operatives. Yet certain factories have managed to keep the looms running. Though they have lost most of their European trade through the isolation of the Central Powers and the economy of the Allied nations, they have increased their exports to the American continent; they are doing well. Grenoble, centre of the kid-glove industry, prospers even more. Much of the labour can be performed by women. The war cut off the Central European market, it greatly reduced French and British consumption but it also closed the Americas to German gloves. If I write here in the present tense, it is because this situation remains at the end of 1916 exactly as it was in the beginning of 1916 ; and it will hold, I suppose, until the end of the war.

In fact, wherever raw materials are to be had, wherever there are markets and wherever women can be used in place of men, France marches along. And on the whole, it manages to fulfil these conditions, I imagine, better than either England or Germany. It has been a land of little, fine industries, requiring skill and the native art-sense rather than physical strength. Among these, the perfumery business is perhaps typical. It includes no processes which women and children cannot perform. And the perfumery district is in the South, far from the invader. The market is bad, of course, but there is lack neither of labour nor of raw material. The employers in this trade have felt their responsibility to France, and with what capital they can command they are piling up stocks to "dump" after the war.

Curiously---at least to an outsider---the wine business has been hit as hard as any. Obviously, the champagne branch of the industry has suffered most of all. That famous and expensive wine takes its name from a province lying along the northern lines. Much of the champagne district has been twice fought over; the French advance in the autumn of 1915 blasted mile after mile of famous vineyards. However in the Bordeaux and Burgundy districts, hundreds of miles behind the lines, there has come a special industrial blight of another kind. Wine-making, as practised by the French, is partly a craft and partly an art. The vintners put a lifetime of study into the business ; they have behind them ten centuries of tradition. That, more than any quality of soil, is why the United States and Algiers have never been able to compete with the French in wine-making. Now these experienced wine-makers were men, and most of them have been called to the colours. Neither women nor inexperienced men can in taught even the rudiments of that art in two years. Famous vintners refused to put their names on the 1915 product ; it was too far inferior.

Though there was prosperity in some branches of production, and almost stable conditions in others, the sum total made not toward plenty but always toward distress. And with this went a rise in the cost of living. France, having over England the advantage of self-sufficiency and over Germany the advantage of open ports, suffered less in this regard than her neighbours; but still living did go up. In February the price of bread remained stable; the government saw to that. A few luxuries, such as hot-house fruit, decreased in price. Meat, in Paris at least, had advanced from a quarter to a third. Away from the sea-coast, fish was scarce and dear. Fresh vegetables had advanced very little in the small provincial towns ; but in the cities, and especially in Paris, this staple had risen most of all. It was mainly a matter of transportation, which waits always on military necessity. The price of fresh vegetables advanced ruinously during the great storm which raged through the first week of the battle at Verdun. In that period, cauliflower heads which sold normally for thirty-five centimes jumped to seventy-five and other vegetables went even higher.

There were certain little privations during that storm which proved that we were in the midst not only of a tempest, but of a battle. One morning, there was no milk for coffee at the hotel. The snow had blocked the milk trains and such snow-ploughs as they have in France---which is unused to such emergencies of weather---were keeping open the vital line to Verdun. So, too, needing a taxicab that day, I hailed a driver who headed a waiting line in the Boulevard des Capucines.

"Ah, monsieur, ça ne marche plus!" he said.

That is a literal transcript of his remark, but it cannot give his gesture and intonation. They indicated that it was frightful, it was unbelievable, it was terrific. The bottom had fallen out of the taxicab business, out of the whole world. In addition, Monsieur was going to be discommoded. But ah, life was ever thus! It was a queer old universe, wasn't it? That was what the French taxicab driver conveyed to me, the while his lips simply informed me that his cab did not march any more.

Then the rest of the line bubbled into the conversation and vouchsafed information. Temporary military necessity had cut off the day's supply of petrol. How much lay hidden under this simple bit of information I did not know until months afterward. The Verdun front, when the battle opened, was insufficiently supplied with rail communication. The German front was perfectly supplied. In the first mad rush, when something on the French side went wrong, the German guns got in range of the single railroad line. The French, magicians at making a horn spoon out of a pig's ear, had mobilized the motor trucks of France as at the Marne they mobilized the taxicabs of Paris. And those trucks, as much as the skill and valour of their troops on the line, saved the day.

Two days later, the taxicabs were running as usual the army had redistributed the petrol supply. France has never been short of that commodity nor of any other essential to war or life. She is, in fact, the most self-sufficient among the Allied countries. Blockade her coasts, indeed, and she could no longer make war indefinitely; there are some essentials to munitions, like this same petrol, which she does not produce. But she could go on feeding and even clothing herself with none of those expensive and troublesome adjustments which Germany has found necessary. And the marvel to me in those darkest days of France at war, was not that little irritations and tiny privations happened, but that with all the vigorous men gone to time war, with the greatest battle of history raging interminably on our north-eastern border, with a line of fire and steel only fifty miles away, we had clean and comfortable beds, we ate plentifully and deliciously, we were served courteously and efficiently, we had the convenience of tramways, cabs, porters, and everything else which a traveller really needs.

Yet this is only a traveller's point of view. The situation bears hard in places on the poor; which brings me to a very tangled subject. I heard it said in Paris, by that kind of upper-class person who is always an optimist on the present condition of the proletariat, that the working class was doing better than ever before. I heard from the people who run charitable organizations that the distress was frightful. I should say that both were half-right and half-wrong. There was, for an example on one side, a woman of whose circumstances I gained accidental knowledge. She belonged, before the war, to that class of family common in France wherein both husband and wife are self-supporting. They had two children born in those institutions which France provides for working-class mothers. When the children were very young, the husband supported the entire family. Afterward, they divided the expense of the children. He went to the war. She received from the government one franc twenty-five centimes a day as a separation allowance. For the two children she received in addition a franc a day. She kept her situation, and she was living for the time being rent-free. In spite of the increased cost of living, she was on the whole better off than before the war.

Further, said these upper-class optimists, there was no unemployment. Every man excused from the line through age or physical disability could get something to do according to his powers. Indeed, that February storm seemed to prove the point. The municipality of Paris called for thirteen hundred labourers to clear the streets of snow. Only a hundred and thirty responded, and part of these were women. Before the day was over, I was regaled by the spectacle of three heavy, peasant-looking girls, dressed in black shawls and wooden shoes, pushing a snow-scraper down the Rue de l'Echelle. If the world knows anything at all about France, it knows how many women have taken over men's work. One grew so accustomed to seeing women in the act of hustling baggage, delivering groceries, blacking boots, ploughing, cleaning out stables, that he ceased to notice the thing as unusual. I do remember, however, a certain tram-car which ran past my door at Bordeaux. On the front platform was a capable-looking young motor-woman, rosy-cheeked, thick-waisted, big-handed. She wore a black skirt and shawl, topped by a peaked cap. When she started the ear, she jerked the brake and laid her weight to the controller-bar with all the snap and vigour of a man. When she drew up at the terminal, she produced from under her shawl a half-finished grey stocking and, until the woman car-starter gave the signal, set herself to knitting. As for the conductress, a black-haired, severe-faced Gascon girl, her air, as she rang her two decisive taps on the bell, said

"I carry on these shoulders the efficiency of the Tramways de Bordeaux. I'd like to see any straggler, lallygagging lover, or drunkard disturb the order of this car!"

Yet to say that the situations outnumber the workers does not tell the story. To begin with, there are the mothers of three, four, or five children, dependent of old on the father's earnings, and that father at the line or dead. The wife's allowance will not sustain life in such times. Now any physician and most women know that in our modern world few women who have had three or four children are thereafter capable of the industrial struggle. Moreover, the French, with that fine idealism which marks their civilization, hold both motherhood and childhood sacred. Public opinion would not tolerate that such a woman should be separated from her children.

Then there are the troubles of readjustment. In the stable times of peace industry roughly arranges people according to their powers, putting the muscular at heavy jobs, the deft-fingered at light jobs. You may be a skilful midinette, capable of sewing a fine seam. When your old job goes because people no longer want expensive clothes, it is no good to enter a munitions factory. hundred pounds of weight, your deft little fingers which never lifted a heavy burden, cannot stand the strain. Still further, in many lines of trade there has been a necessary reduction of wages. Employers who cut pay in two during these times are not generally to be blamed. It was a choice between that or closing up shop and throwing everyone out of work. Nevertheless, to cut a Continental wage in two is to reduce it below the standard of living in any times.

The class just a notch higher in the financial scale I than those who work with their hands is the one which in any hard times seems to suffer most. The retail tradesman of Paris is doing better than during the early days of the war, but only comparatively better. In October, 1914, when I first saw France at war, probably four out of five shops were closed, with the words "Personnel mobilisé" written in chalk across the steel shutters. By March, 1915, when I saw the city again, they had begun to open fast. More had opened by autumn and still more by this spring. Yet always the blocks away from the central district were dotted with the grey colour of closed shutters. Last March, I made a rough inventory from the window of my hotel. The first building on the road across the street was a hotel---closed. Below stood a fashionable shop for the sale of sporting specialities---closed. Who wants such things now ? Next was a cleanser and dyer---open. Next was a shop without any sign outside of the shutters to show its character, but closed. Next was a tobacconist ---open And so on.

The shops which deal in necessities, as groceries and bakeries, are running, of course, and are probably doing business above the margin of profits. Those which deal with luxuries have shut down or are marking time. In many cases madame has opened up in order to hold the business together. She has to keep the stock somewhere; perhaps she may get a customer---who knows?

Along the Arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, facing the Tuileries Gardens, runs a row of shops for the sale of jewellery, Oriental curios, and such trifles as tourists buy to remember Paris. There are no tourists the only patrons now are occasional soldiers from England or the Provinces, getting little souvenirs to send home. I passed down that row one day last spring, looking idly into the windows. From each shop popped madame, to solicit my custom with such charm and wistfulness that I must needs harden my heart.

Some of the small rentiers, the people living on the incomes of invested funds, are perhaps most pinched of all. Much of the capital was invested in the factories of the North. It goes without saying that Lille and vicinity pay no dividends now. I know one Frenchman who was worth five million francs before the war---manufacturing properties about Lille. One factory was totally destroyed. The rest were "ripped up"---the machinery packed and sent to Germany. This is a sign, by the way, to indicate that the Germans were never confident of holding Belgium and Northern France. "I own the sites---that is all! " says this man.

As for those who have depended for a living on rents, and especially of tenement properties, many are hard hit. At the beginning of the war the government declared its moratorium on rent. By this measure those who could not pay might appear before the duly appointed authorities and swear to the fact, whereupon payment would lapse until the end of the war. Just how the tenants will pay accumulated rents after the declaration of peace is a matter for future adjustment. Probably the state will step in. But that brings no present relief to the property owner. Last winter a woman applied for work at sewing in one of the ouvroirs---a job which pays very poorly. Two years before she was living on one of those small but respectable invested incomes so common on the Continent. But the money was in stocks and real estate which had not rendered her a penny since August, 1914. She had spent all her immediate funds; it was a choice between working at the only thing a woman of her age and training could do, or charity.

And the charities of France are infinite; it is they which have given work to so many hands which never worked before. The posters, the shop signs, the banners of societies for war relief, called us from every wall and window when I entered Paris in February; they were calling even louder when I left in August. It is give, give, give----money, time, thought. The Paris Herald or the Continental Daily Mail was scarcely out on the streets, announcing you as registered at your hotel, before the women began to send letters or to call in person. Sister Cecilia, of the Little Sisters, came on the day after my arrival. At her special request I disguise her name and that of her order. "Publicity is against our rules," she said.

She proved to be an Englishwoman, a Londoner by birth. Choosing the hardest chair in the room, she settled down to talk of the order and of her poor. They look after working families ; first the ne'er-do-wells which any people have always with them, and then the mothers who cannot go out to earn a living because there are too many children. They hunt out these people, and go to work at their task of cleaning, of feeding, and of keeping the families together. There are more and more cases. "The French are a very saving people," said Sister Cecilia, '' but, of course, savings don't last for ever, and when the money is gone they come to us." Sometimes, I took it from her account, they come rather late in the game---only when privation has broken down their pride. She told over some of her instances ; only one sticks in my memory. It was an old woman, whom they found moaning and mumbling in a fireless house. She had four sons when the war broke out ; they are all gone, and the death of the last and youngest broke her reason.

Sister Cecilia spoke also of the militant priests of France. "They passed a law mobilizing priests in 1900 or thereabouts," she said. "Well"---Sister Cecilia's expression showed that she thought of that---"but behold the Providence of Almighty God. This affliction has come, and the priests can be a great consolation to their comrades, not only in their last moments, but always---little kindnesses, little comforts." Her order had houses in Belgium and in the imperilled or invaded districts of Northern France. Their establishment at Paris had become a clearing-house for refugee nuns. Among the thousands and thousands of war stories which she had heard, two seemed to stick in her memory; and the character of these stories is a revelation of her character.

"Our mother-house was at Rheims, she said. "The Sisters remained through the bombardment. The cathedral was full of German wounded. All the approaches were under shellfire---even the soldiers could not cross them, because the Germans dropped a shell as soon as anyone appeared on the street. That afternoon some French soldiers came to the Sisters and told them that the German wounded had nothing to eat. Someone had shouted it across the street. The Sisters themselves had only a little bread. But one of the French soldiers said "Some broth would be good for them ' The soldiers went out under fire and cut four or five big pieces of flesh from an artillery horse which had just been killed by a shell. As night came on the soldiers and the Sisters made a big kettle of bouillon ---the soldiers ruined a kitchen table chopping up the meat into little pieces. The soldiers did not take any of it, although they were hungry themselves. Then, when night came, the Sisters and the soldiers poured the broth into pails and carried it across under fire. One of the soldiers was wounded. The Germans were very grateful. It was quite touching," concluded Sister Cecilia, with her native English chariness of emotional expression. Her other story related to an Irish woman married to a Belgian, whose husband was arrested in Brussels. She applied again and again to see him, but she was always refused. Finally the Prussian officer in charge of the prison said "Madame, you know probably the whereabouts of certain British subjects hiding in Brussels. If you will tell us where they are, we will let you see your husband."

The lady made no answer, but she stared at his breast. The officer glanced down. She had her eyes fixed on his Iron Cross. He coloured, stammered, and "Madame." he said, "in war one must do things for his Kaiser which he would not do for himself."

"That is the trouble with them, perhaps," said Sister Cecilia, reconciling her large Christian charity with her natural feelings, "they have to obey their orders. I took care of one of them, wounded. He used to look at the photograph of his wife and children, and cry."

However, France does not leave the care of the poor wholly to unorganized effort. The separation allowance affords at least a basis of living to the soldier's wife. Most French towns and all the wards of Paris looked out, during the Winter of Verdun, for the most pressing need---coal. Any poor family which ran short of fuel could receive a scant but sufficient supply from the Mairie. In certain districts where the paralysis of industry or the difficulty of transportation created a special need, the town supplied provisions for the poor. France saw to it that no one should starve or freeze during the winter when Europe first settled down to the pace of war, and that no child should grow up stunted through privation. But the strain of maintaining the effort was heavy, and it will grow still heavier as the war goes on.

The horde of aliens and half-aliens whom France must sustain vastly complicate the problem. She has become a dumping ground for refugees. First arrived inhabitants of Northern France, driven ahead of the Germans as they advanced toward the Marne. These were no sooner distributed in Touraine, Burgundy, and the Midi, than the families of Belgian coal-miners and factory-operatives, running away from the German drive to the Yser arrived by hundreds of thousands. When starvation threatened the occupied districts of Northern France, the Germans began to dump the people, as their supplies gave out, across the Swiss border. The American-staffed Commission for Relief in Belgium added Northern France to its gigantic activities and stopped this exodus, but not before a hundred thousand more refugees had added themselves to the burden of Free France. In the first week of the great battle, the Germans turned their guns on the city of Verdun, and ruined it. Thirty thousand civilians came down to the Puy de Dôme country in Eastern France. There are even Armenian, Servian, and Montenegrin refugees, clamouring with the rest for food and shelter. These people intensify the embarrassment of France. Yet they must be sustained; and though the gifts from the Allies and America have been enormous, they have not nearly met the necessity.

Civilian relief is the bread-and-beef of war work military relief is its wine and dessert. Government officials and directors of private charities warn the people continually not to forget the soldier's wife and child in their zeal to comfort the heroes at the front.

The strain of Verdun and the approach of the summer campaign put an end to the most picturesque soldier-charity of all---the permission de poilu. All winter, the army had been granting leaves of absence, running from five days to a fortnight. But the French Army does not believe in turning a soldier loose on the world---it disturbs discipline. When he gets leave he must go to his family. Now there are in the army at least a hundred and fifty thousand men enlisted from those parts of Northern France held by the Germans. They cannot get home. Also in the French Army, as in any other, are men without relatives in France---foreign legionaries, reservists from the United States, for example. They say that it was an American woman who first proposed that French families make "godsons " of these men. taking them in, assuming responsibility for their conduct. That idea was much more revolutionary in France than it would have been in England or America. The aristocratic or bourgeois family of France forms a closed circle, and the last thing a Frenchman does is to invite an acquaintance to visit his home informally. Nevertheless, this idea became immediately popular. Everyone was doing it---even the hotels. The restaurants and cafés displayed a poster, showing a "mine-host"-looking person, standing by a full board and welcoming a bearded, helmeted soldier, who advanced in an apologetic attitude. The lettering advertised the work of the hotel-keepers and restaurateurs' association, formed for the purpose of helping the permission de poilu."

Stories both amusing and touching were told of this work. In Bordeaux a party of us Americans sat down one night beside a family group---two middle-aged women, two middle-aged men, a delicately featured young girl of about seventeen, and the poilu, He was an amusing little gargoyle of a man, with a front tooth missing, a merry eye, and a rough but animated manner. Suddenly he leaned over toward me and ask in English if he might look at my evening newspaper.

This, of course, was only an advance toward conversation, and the moment he opened his mouth I knew that be got his English in America, not England. He was, in fact, a coal-miner who had come from war to war---for he had fought with his union behind the barricades at the Ludlow strike. Sixteen years he had been mining in the United States, and five of those years on strike. But at that he preferred American mines to those about Lille, where he learned his trade. His old mother was shut up in Lille. He had heard no word of her nor of his sisters---the universal story of the Northern Frenchman and the Belgian refugee. He preferred to talk of that fight at Ludlow rather than of the fighting about Arras, through which he had come unwounded. Mother Jones---now there was a woman! The operators were afraid of Mother Jones "I bet if that Mrs. Pankhurst had come out," he said, "we'd 'a beat ol' John D. Rockefeller han's down " So touchingly complete seemed to be his faith in militant womanhood. He had learned to play baseball in America ; and because he had developed thereby a throwing arm, which he let us feel, his captain had made him a grenadier bomb-thrower.

However, the remarks of the poilu from Lille and Ludlow interested us rather less, on the whole, than a little drama which the women of our party worked out from the expression of the young French girl. When ever she permitted her gaze to rest on his face, her expression ranged from disdain to deep disappointment. Plainly, when she learned that her family was going to quarter a soldier on permission, she had her young girl's dreams. She expected probably a handsome and refined soldier, with silky moustaches and deep, dark eyes, preferably slightly wounded, so that she could read him poetry while bathing his brow with eau de Cologne. She got---this. If the rest of the family had any sense of humour at all, they must have loved him; but he was not a young girl's ideal.

Dining at the house of an American friend, I found a poilu in full uniform covered by an inharmonious apron, waiting at table. He was the family butler, home on permission. When he learned that madame was giving a dinner, he had expressed real regret that he could not serve it, having no suitable clothes. " You night wear your uniform," she suggested. "May I!" he answered eagerly. So he served us ; and it was a little incongruous---this bronzed, fit soldier, with the lock of determination and of experience in his face, waiting on us pale, flabby civilians. They tell me that the desire to resume his old civilian occupation is strong in the soldier home on permission. During that interval between struggles, hardships, perils, and alarms it rests him somehow. I have found waiters, elevator boys, and cabmen who proved to be soldiers on permission. The peasant very generally puts in his leave ploughing or setting the place to rights. None of us can realize, probably, how restful it is to work again with the old horse, the old dog, the old familiar tools; and this to me is not the smallest pathos of the Great War.

Hand in hand with the permission de poilu goes the institution of "godsons " at the line. French and foreign women, with a little means to spare, "adopt" soldiers without means, making themselves responsible for the little comforts which help a soldier endure his lot. That also has its amusing side. A young woman of sensibility adopted a peasant infantryman. She wrote to him, breaking gently her new relationship, and asking him what he lacked. "Since madame is so kind," he wrote back in ungrammatical French, which I cannot convey by translation, "a wool undershirt and a pair of drawers." Another wrote: "Send me only money." The hardest quandary of all, however, was put up to a wounded soldier in the American Ambulance Hospital. A little American girl, acting as his godmother, sent him a box of presents with a letter. "I am putting in," she said, "a Testament which my grandfather carried all through the Civil War." However, the Testament was not in the package. With fine French understanding for the ways of women toward little girls, the soldier reached the conclusion that mother, in arranging the package, had quietly abstracted the valued family relic. When last heard from he was trying to compose a letter expressing proper gratitude while concealing the fact that the Testament --so valuable to mother's Protestant soul, so useless to this Catholic Frenchman---had not arrived.

These, as I have said, are the more picturesque charities. It is always more entertaining to succour a soldier fighting for his country at the front than to care for his wife, his widow, his children or his orphans. But those quieter charities are more important to the future of France and they have absorbed the best French effort, both public and private. One large commercial house with head-quarters in Paris has branches scattered all over France. It has not made a franc since the war began in fact, most of the branch houses are closed. Nevertheless, the heads of the firm, by liquidating some private securities, have helped their employees to weather the storm. Individuals like these have given small fortunes to fill in the chinks which private charity always leaves, the special cases not covered by any organization.

Scratch anywhere in these days, even into this matter-of-fact kind of charity, and you turn up a good story. In the autumn of 1915, an American clergyman living at Paris visited a hospital just behind the trenches. To him came the old priest of the parish. "In the name of God," he said, "can you do something to help us? I am in charge of seven parishes. I cover them on foot---I cannot ask for a horse now. The other six priests were mobilized---three are dead. Our harvest is coming and we have no men---the women are not enough. Can you help us ?" When the American clergyman returned to Paris, he found in his mail a draft from New York. "For any purpose which seems good to you," said the letter of enclosure. He met that morning a rich American and told him the story. "I'll give the other half," said this man. The next day a new American harvester started for the line ; and Catholic priest and Protestant clergyman together directed a crew of old men and ex-soldiers while they saved the grain of seven parishes.

Finally, I come to the state of art in Paris, which is a condition dismal enough, though there are flashes of humour, too. From the cold view of economics, art amounted to a leading Parisian industry. How many people drew their living from the studios, no one has ever calculated, I suppose; but they must have numbered tens of thousands. When you interpret art in its broadest sense, including not only painting and sculpture, but music, the drama, and such polite literature as poetry, the account probably runs into hundreds of thousands. That first uncertain year of the war, when Europe was adjusting itself to conditions which might, seemed then, last no more than a year, brought a curious condition to the Latin Quarter, Montmartre and those other districts where students and practitioners of the arts most gather. Life was in a state of imperfect adjustment. Mimi of the studios was keeping house until the men-folks got back ; and Mimi was caring for herself, or being cared for. by inefficient and engaging methods characteristic of the Bohemian life. There was, for example, the little flock chaperoned by the Sweet Singer of Flanders. The person who enjoys, among the British and Americans of the Quarter, that mellifluous title, is a Belgian poet with a deformed foot, which keeps him out of the army. When the men of France were mobilized, seven of his painter-chums left their sweethearts under his charge. The German invasion cut off Ghent and his income simultaneously; he abandoned poetry and got a position at small salary in a railroad office. Thereafter, he used to appear every evening at a certain café where, just after the war, the wandering Americans and English gathered before dinner. With him, he brought his flock he ranged them at a table and waited to see whether anyone was going to ask them to dinner. If this happened, well and good ; the Sweet Singer, being himself invited, always pleaded an engagement. If no one proved generous, he led his girls to the cheapest place he could find and bought their dinner himself. Another careless cavalier of the Quarter had a little allowance from home. Living as tightly as he could, he counted up on Saturday night his remaining francs. These he invested in bags of coal, and carried his purchases himself to the little furnished rooms of the more needy models.

Other tales came out, more distressing than these. One night three Canadian officers on leave visited Paris. They had never seen the city before, and they knew no French. Wandering without guide, they brought up at a café on the left bank. Three women, young and attractive, sat at the next table. The officers made their acquaintance. Two of them spoke English. Finally, the officers proposed that they should go to dinner together. The girls parleyed for a few moments in French before they accepted, and the party adjourned to the dining-room. They had an apéritif, they had soup when suddenly the girl who spoke no English seemed to go stark mad. She burst into tears, she tried to tear off her clothes, to throw herself out of the window. A French scene followed; a passing ambulance took her away to the hospital.

When she was gone, one of the girls who spoke English turned to her hosts.

"She had eaten nothing for three days," she said--- "that is the matter with her, only that. We had just found her. We were wondering what to do---for we have no money---when you gentlemen were so kind--"

"Who is she?" asked one of the Canadians.

"She was an actress, and a good one. But we are not saving in our profession---and who wants actresses now?

Things have improved a little for some of the arts. The musicians and actresses were doing better, by the summer of 1916, than one might have expected in the beginning. The education of the young proceeds as ever; teaching music helps the musicians. Some theatres have opened, for people must amuse themselves even in such times as these all over France, even up to the gun-positions, the cinemas are running. Your moving-picture audiences are always avid for contemporary subjects, and the demand for film-plays dealing with the war has justified producers in reopening studios in the Midi where actresses and old actors may find work. But nothing has happened to cause a demand for statuary or pictures. I make one exception to this general statement. The portrait painters are doing fairly well, because officers going to the front like to leave their pictures for their children, "in case----" Even the schools are flattened out. The Beaux Arts had 1,200 students before the war. All but 100 were called out in the first mobilization. Julian's academy used to run three ateliers. In the spring of 1915 but one was open, and that for only half-days. The pupils, in the Winter of Verdun included a few people too old for war-work who chose this method of taking their minds off their troubles. Among them was a retired butcher. The English and Americans are different. With us, he would have taken to golf or pinocle.

With these permanent hard times, the Quarters have changed again. Mimi has gone away---home to her people of the provinces, or into the munition factories. The kind of model to whom her art was only an incident of a butterfly life has abandoned the struggle to those serious-minded women who regard their art as a career. In the Latin Quarter of Paris, as in Greenwich Village New York, or whatever artistic colony you may name, there was a mixture of work and trifling, of people who are heralds of to-morrow and of mere poseurs. Many of the poseurs, being unmobilized foreigners, lingered through the first winter. By the Winter of Verdun they had mostly drifted away. One sees them now only in two cafés on the Boulevard Montparnasse, still talking art for art's sake and making gestures with their thumbs. But it is the last stand of the Old Guard.

With the real artists and their families it is quite another matter. Most of the best French painters are out in the trenches or disabled; the rest are painting still for love of art but they are desperately hard up. No one knows how they and their families would have lived but for the "canteens." These are virtually boarding-houses for painter-people and all others who depended for existence on art. One pays if he can---usually about thirty centimes a meal. If he cannot pay, the canteen forgets it, and no one knows the difference.

The work is twofold a large French society, supported to a certain extent from America, has a string of canteens all over Paris; and the Appui aux Artistes, supported entirely from America, has five such establishments.

I had luncheon one day in a Latin-Quarter branch of the Appui---"a typical canteen," they told me. Before the war, this was a provision shop. The painters had knocked together long wooden tables, which they covered with oilcloth. They had leased and set up a restaurant range. A réformé painter and his wife served---without pay---as steward and accountant. The women all took turns in waiting at table. The only paid employees, I take it, were the cook and the scullion. We had cabbage soup, sheep's legs stewed with vegetables, pudding, fruit, new wine, eider, and coffee. The cooking was French; therefore it was good. This meal, sold for thirty centimes, cost about sixty centimes, not including rent and overhead charges. The guests were mainly women; but there were two old men, one young fellow excused from military service because of a very bad heart, and one youth who limped painfully---he had been maimed for life at Soissons. Two perambulators, with occupants, stood in the corner. Everyone, as he sat down to his meal, gave that indescribable "ah" of anticipation with which your Frenchman approaches the table ; and everyone was gravely cheerful, if I may express it so.

At one of the canteens a visitor heard an old gentleman remarking acidly that luncheon to-day was worse, far worse, than luncheon yesterday; he didn't know what the place was coming to. This ingratitude appalled the visitor until he learned the facts from the directrice. This man has higher standing with his fellows than with the public ; although his is a famous name, he has never made any money. He is also one of those artists who are as children in practical affairs, and his wife runs his life. When everything was gone, his wife took him and the children to a canteen. But she never told him the whole truth; for his pride would not have stooped to charity. He thinks that he is living in a co-operative boarding-house, to which Madame is paying the full price. Everyone understands this, and humours the illusion. The directors say that half their trouble lies in running down cases and persuading them that this is not really charity. Neither is it. The world is simply paying back to France the debt life owes to art.

The next evening I dined in a more picturesque canteen. He who knows Paris need not be told of the Hill of Montmartre. Its abrupt crest dominates the whole city. There, of old times, stood a hill-village independent of its great neighbour; and until recently, when modern cafés, studios and apartment-houses began to creep in, Montmartre remained the most picturesque part of Paris. We crept up sidewalks that were stairs; we threaded alleys shut in by walls that had gathered moss for centuries; we ducked through an oval door into a courtyard ; we plunged into the darkness of another wall. A door opened suddenly into a long, low room, with fifty people eating and chattering at tables lit by a big oil lamp shaded with green Chinese silk. Hung thick on all walls was a collection of pictures, prints and what not, contributed, I take it, by all the guests for the decoration of their boarding-house, and arranged with an artist's sense of the whimsical. Here was a sketch with an unusual effect ; here was a very bad painting thrown in for a joke ; here was a caricature of a studio character; here some of those crude child-drawings always so amusing to your true painter; here was a water colour of real merit.

Each guest, as he finished his course, took his plate and went into the kitchen for the next---every man his own waiter. They had borne more than their share of the war, these people. There were war-widows among them ; there were men who must return to the line when their wounds healed; there were men who will never walk straight again; and all were flat, dead broke. Yet, though the artist be tottering on the verge of the grave, the spirit of art remains the spirit of youth; they were more nearly gay than any group I have seen in Paris.

A sign on the wall of another canteen expresses this spirit. Certain neighbours must have objected because the artists made music for here it is, as freely translated from Parisian argot to our slang: "In consideration for the spiritual sensitiveness and pure blockheadedness of the neighbours, cut out the song---even the Marseillaise."

War or peace, your artist is your happy man!

When they brought Private Leroux---as I shall call him---into the Lighthouse where they teach the blind to read and work, he smiled. He kept on smiling, until his cheerfulness became a tradition. He had less cause for smiles, perhaps, than anyone else among those victims of war's most cruel calamity. For he had lost not only his sight but one hand. The nurses at the Lighthouse say that most of their mutilés cry at times during the period of adjustment to a new two-dimensional world. But not Leroux. When he began to learn the Braille alphabet, when it dawned on him that he could read again, he laughed like a boy. They have a typewriter at the Lighthouse for the mutilated blind--the spacing is done by the feet. Leroux attacked it with enthusiasm, making little jokes when the instructor read him his first results with the touch system. Everyone held up Leroux as a model to those patients who cried or sulked.

He had been a month or two at the Lighthouse when news came unexpectedly from his Commandant, at whose side he had been wounded. The Commandant, reported missing, long ago judicially dead, had suddenly appeared in Switzerland with a convoy of prisoners exchanged because they were too badly mutilated for any use of war. He had been picked up between the lines, his face shot across behind the eyes, by the German medical corps. He too was blind, stone blind.

On the day after Leroux heard this, he sat down and wrote his Commandant a letter. He did not trust his own imperfect typewriting, but dictated it to a nurse, so that the people of the Lighthouse knew what he wrote. He told of all they had done for him, of all they could do for the Commandant. Wouldn't he come?

It was a great thing to read again and to know that one might work again. "I didn't think there was any more light for me," he concluded simply, "but now I have found light. Won't you come too, my dear Commandant?" Then, everyday, he waited for an answer.

The Commandant never replied to this letter. But one morning there appeared in the doorway of the Directory a tall man, "as tall," said Miss Holt, the Directress, ''as tall as---as Albert of Belgium." He wore an officer's uniform, and he was leaning on the shoulder of the little nurse who had brought him all the way from Switzerland. He introduced himself as the Commandant, and asked at once for Leroux.

Miss Holt took hint to the garden and sent for Leroux. Presently there came a "tap-tap-tap-tap" of a blind man's stick nearer and nearer along the corridor, and Leroux stepped out, his stick reaching eagerly.

"Leroux," said the Directress, "here is your Commandant," and, "Commandant, here is Leroux." She led them together.

They stood silent, holding each other by the forearms. Then Leroux's good hand and his stump began to travel up, up---feeling. He reached the Commandant's shoulders, his neck, his face, until the fingers of the one good hand rested on the bandage covering that place where the eyes had been.

"My Commandant!---my Commandant!--- cried Leroux. And dropping his head upon his Commandant's breast, Leroux, who had never shed a tear over his own blindness, wept like a child.

"I HAVE asked the driver to stop round that corner," said the Lieutenant of Alpini, our guide and escort, "because I wish to give you gentlemen a new sensation. It isn't new to me, but it is still very thrilling." We were threading the narrow streets of a little Italian village as he spoke now we flashed out into open country, crossed a stone bridge, and brought up beside a straggling orchard. The prospect was bright and gracious---April, sunshine and Italy---but the green fields, the peeping towers of village churches, the distant panorama of blue-and-white mountains, held no element of surprise. We had been seeing that all the morning, as we drove north toward the line. We looked at the lieutenant, and comprehension began to dawn. He had vaulted over a door of our touring-car, and taken up his station beside the road.

He stood there---a tall, lean muscular figure, a cleancut face blue-white in complexion, a pair of grey-brown eyes. Those eyes were dancing with the quick emotional excitement of his race.

"You have the pleasure, you friends of liberty," he said, "of standing on soil conquered by an Allied army. That"---he pointed back---"was the old frontier. There"---he indicated a hill-vista straight ahead---"we are fighting now! Over there"---he gestured with his left hand toward the distant white rim of mountains"---we have redeemed still more territory. You will see to-day Italian courts, Italian schools where the Austrians ruled a year ago." He mounted into the car again, and the driver started up. His eyes still danced. Then he swept his hand over the far vista in front.

"You see from here what Italy fights for: is it not so?" he said.

Indeed, as we drove northward through the newly-redeemed Italy toward the Isonzo front, our destination, it lay before us like a diagram. We were travelling across a pleasant, green country, as level as Flanders. But all round our front horizon there ran, like the edge of a flat-bottomed bowl, the vista of the Alps---mountains more precipitous and lacy than any we know on the American continent. To the right, where lay the Isonzo front, they began to heave skyward in great foothills. They rose up and up, until, far to the left, they became a tangle of peaks, crowned with eternal snow. Now that old frontier, which we had just crossed, ran mostly along the plains country. Beyond it, stretching far into the mountains, curving round the head of the Adriatic, dwelt a population mostly Italian in language, in sentiment, in national feeling. The patchwork Austrian Empire, trying to run on Germanic ideals a mixture of Teutons, Slavs, Czechs, and Hungarians, had also been trying for many troublesome years to warp the Italians into a system which the Latin loathes by instinct. So arose discriminations, arrests, political punishments on one side, and conspiracies on the other. As in Alsace-Lorraine, there was singing of national hymns under the breath, circulation of nationalist literature behind closed doors, a current of national life running under the surface. All that morning, as we sped on toward the front, we were to behold how thoroughly this district was Latin, not Teutonic. Everywhere the names on the signboards, the designations on the public buildings, were in Italian ; the churches bore campanili undistinguishable from those across the line; the people spoke the dialect of Venice. That is the first and more popular object of Italy-at-war: to rescue ---"Italia Irridenta "---unredeemed Italy.

We looked toward the hills, following the finger of our Lieutenant while he pointed out, in the tangle of distant mountains, peaks and passes of which we had heard only through the communiqués. The old frontier ran mostly across the plain, The last great effort of United Italy came in 1866; the occupation of Rome in 1870 was only a completion of the inevitable. When that year dawned, Austria still held the Venetian province and much else that is now blood and bone of Italy. To get this territory, the new kingdom joined Germany in her war on Austria. Germany won, and so did Italy. But Germany won first. Garibaldi was only approaching Trent, his objective, when Bismarck made a sudden peace with Austria. The new kingdom, betrayed and tricked, had to take what she could get. It suited Bismarck's policy to make Austria a strong ally and Italy a vassal. So, as he laid out the border, he gave Austria the heights, Italy the plains; everywhere, the peaks and passes remained in the hands of the Teuton, a menace to the Latin. In any new war, the Austrians would be pouring downward, the Italians struggling upward. This condition has always been a matter of concern to the military clan, who understood that an alliance binding such remote ideals as those of the Teuton and the Latin must be artificial. So Italy is fighting not only for her unredeemed part, but for the security of her borders. That, also, became plain as the course of our automobile brought peak after peak into clearer view, as the Lieutenant pointed out old Austrian and new Italian positions with expressive stabs of his finger. He came back, presently, to the flat, fertile country which stretched about us, included it all with a wave of his arm.

"And if you only knew," he said, "how Cadorna took this plain---forced the Austrians back until they stuck in the mountains. We could not mobilize on the border---that would have betrayed our intention. He did it---superbly---with a handful of frontier troops. It may be ten years before we know the whole story. It was" ---he hesitated before he made the final comparison of excellence---"it was worthy of Garibaldi!"

Now we were drawing on, toward the zone of operations; and perhaps I had better begin the story of the thirty crowded hours which followed, with the music. For that day's work began with human music; and that night's rest was to begin, most strangely, with a divine music of another kind.

A military band stood tooting and drumming full strength before a row of newly-made, whitewashed sheds, thrown together from boards, corrugated sheetiron and building-paper. It was playing the boys home to the rest station---a regiment just back from ten days in the Isonso trenches. They came on with the loose, easy route-step of veterans. Their uniforms, once trim and smart, had been stained and rumpled in the red soil of the Carso until the original olive-grey had changed to a spotted dun-colour. They were of the swarthy South; little, sturdy men built like wrestlers. To me they appeared like nothing so much as a gang of those Italian labourers who dig our reservoirs, build our railroads and delight our souls in the United States. Make their overalls all alike, hang them with fantastic packs, give them guns instead of shovels, and you have them ---all but the expression. There is a look of the trenches, a pinched appearance, such as I have seen on the faces of women who have watched too long beside sick beds. So they appeared until they caught the sound of the music---a gay Southern march. Their shoulders, a little bent, straightened up; their faces lightened; they began really to march again, and here and there one of these sprightly boys whistled with the tune.

We had passed them; and for miles we ran through a new-green spring landscape, wherein reigned that curious quiet which marks the middle courses of an army zone. And not alone the quiet revealed it for what it was, but visible signs. Here and there a great military balloon hung immobile in the sky, looking, with its water-grey colouring, like some fat sluggish marine creature which had wandered out of its element.

Supplies and forage were going forward, it was the baggage train of a Southern regiment, and these were Sicilian carts, their bodies painted, in primary colours, with legends of the saints and of old Sicilian knights. Next was a forage convoy, drawn by sober, plodding oxen, dirty white or pale cream in colour, armed with horns that by comparison made those of a Texas steer seem slight and delicate. Our military chauffeur slowed his breakneck speed as we passed through one or two little towns. The children, skipping out of our way, regarded us soberly from the doors and alleys. The carters neither cracked their whips, nor sang, nor dozed on the seats as is the usual fashion of the Italian carter. The whole world seemed quiet and alert. Now we were nearing the hills; and at their foot flowed the river.

"The Isonzo," said the Lieutenant; and there was the same pride in his voice as there had been an hour before when he said "The old frontier."

It was a gentle and gracious river, of a milky, turquoise blue like the tropic seas about Bermuda. Just beyond low a forest in its light, spring green ; and beyond that rose low hills of a dull brick-red. A bridge spanned the river; just across was a small town. To the left, one of those bare, red hills seemed to have burst through the forest. It ran to the water's edge. And---

"Look! " said the lieutenant.

We had heard no sound of guns, for the wind lay in the wrong quarter, and the motor of our somewhat over-driven car had been thumping. But on a slope of this nearest hill a smoke was rising, a pillar of dust which blew away in a light fog like the morning-mist of hills. As we looked, another dust-pillar, with a spurt of angry red at its core, burst into being on the hillside. They were exploding shells---and big ones.

The chauffeur let out his last notch of speed. We shot across the bridge, and I was aware that the little town stood uninhabited, that most of it windows gaped without glass or sash, that smoke streamed from a shattered roof. We came out into a square, its pavement littered with the plaster-dust that had been walls.

A few houses stood, untouched; from their doorways soldiers peered out at us. At a street corner stood a sentry-box, reinforced inside and out with sand-bags. The sentry craned his neck round the edge to stare at us. Farther on, soldiers were shovelling a path through a street newly covered with ruins. They paused, some of them, with pickaxes poised in air, to look and to chatter. Nearer, a squad temporarily out of employ lolled on the steps of a house so newly ruined that it was still smoking. They sat up. I heard the word Borghesi! (civilians!) pass in explosive Italian from mouth to mouth. We were beyond the civilian world now; our appearance had produced a sensation.

The Lieutenant stopped to get directions; Hiatt, the Associated Press man, and I conversed in our native tongue.

"Hello I speak English," came from the lolling soldiers.

We made ourselves known as Americans. At that word, another rose, and still another; they came forward, screwing up their faces to struggle with the almost forgotten language of their adopted country.

"I work-a four years in America," said one.

"I work for the General Electric Company in Schenectady," said another. "I got my job yet---I take a vacation for the war."

"I work in New York---West Side docks," said the third, a small and cheerful man. "Say," he added, "better get along if you're going---they're reaching for us."

"Well, it's a long way from Broadway," I said as the machine started.

"Sure!" they answered in chorus, and flashed their white teeth at me. It did seem, just then, a very long way to Broadway and a flat in Stuyvesant Square and a certain club corner in Gramercy Park---and a cannon does not inspect the passports of its target.

We entered now a little hill wood. The new April green of its slender oaks and elms was shot with the darker green of severe pines. Underfoot a brook ran through tangled water-weeds, and the herbage sprang as soft and filmy as though those distant roars were the thunder of the heavens, not of man. This did not last long; for as we rounded a turn it became a goblin wood of strange, grotesque activities. There were heaps of iron stakes riveted to square plates---supports for barbed-wire entanglements. There were rolls of barbed wire. There were corded piles of timber. There were sand-bags arranged in place like masonry, or awaiting arrangement. There were trenches and barricades, and holes---just holes. Everywhere men in trench helmets or grey soldier caps and incredibly dusty uniforms toiled at the heaviest kind of heavy labour. We pulled up at a set of steps leading to a château.

I suppose I had better not describe too narrowly what had happened to this château, lest I direct Austrian fire. It was a wreck of a thing which had once been pretentious and yet beautiful. It had been painted outside in high-coloured frescoes, after the fashion of Northern Italy, and a nymph or a grape-vine border standing here and there on a sliver of remaining wall merely pointed the desolation. Outbuildings, once of very pretty and tasteful architecture, looked like the palaces of the Cæsars. War had not left it even the dignity of ruin. It was packed with sand-bag barricades or with military structures of wood and iron, and littered with army kit. On the lawn, where once family and guests had taken their tea. a dusty rank of army mules mouthed at a cement horse-trough.

One garden wall, however, stood intact. Set at its corner was a bas-relief in marble.

''Does that strike you as curious?" asked the Lieutenant.

It did not, for a moment; I had been seeing that device in Northern Italy for many days. It was the crowned lion, symbol of the old Republic of Venice. Then I remembered that this had been Austrian soil.

The Lieutenant, with his quick Italian comprehension, saw my face light up and he laughed.

"Yes!" he said, "and a brave man is in prison because of that. An Austrian prince of the blood owned this château. Three months before Germany brought war on the world---those fools who believe that she did not plan it---he sold this house hurriedly and cheaply to a rich Italian living here on the Isonzo---an Italian at heart, but Austrian through persecution. While Italy waited to declare war, he put the lion of Venice into this wall. Yes, it was gloriously foolish. He is in prison for it. But it is here---and so are we," he waved his hand over the low hills just beyond. "On the Carso.''

I had not quite appreciated, until then, what the Carso meant ; I was to know more as the day went on. It is a kind of desert-patch, dropped by some freak of nature into the midst of a country which drips fertility. It is all iron-red rocks, dusted with an iron-red soil in which little grows. It rises in a range of low hills with abrupt drops here and there; and the crests are sown with bowls called "dolinos," almost as round and regular as the craters of the moon or the bubbles in boiling porridge. We did not understand its whole conformation until later; all we saw was rocks, a forest thinning out to solitary trees as it reached the barren red soil, and grotesque military works. As we advanced, a series of near explosions punctuated the occasional dull booms from across the hill ; also rocks and dirt spurted through the trees.

"Only blasting," reassured the Lieutenant; "we have to blast our shelters and trenches in this soil.''

And now we had reached a dug-out in a hillside---just a little room like the cabin of a small yacht. The roof sloped like the peak of a cap over the low pine door, and it was made of sand-bags. A tall, lean, elderly gentleman in the uniform of a high officer stood at the entrance. Other officers ranged themselves beside him and introduced themselves by standing at attention and giving their names---as is the etiquette of the Italian army.

They had just finished luncheon, said the Commander; had he known we were coming, he would have provided for us; but wouldn't we have some bread and cheese and coffee? We accepted; a moment later we were seated with the officers round the table, while the military servant was squeezing past us, setting out dishes. There are usually little home touches about these dugouts, a pathetic clinging to the desires for beauty and refinement in the midst of ugliness and savagery. On the wall of this one hung an ornamental hat-rack, "borrowed" doubtless from the château; and a row of potted plants, just budding, fringed the strip of side-walk at the door. Also, among the field-glasses, revolvers, charts, military papers which littered the single shelf, were a few books and a pile of illustrated magazines. These the commander indicated.

'They're mostly English," he said "I lived long in England, and I like their humour. It's quieter and drier than yours, isn't it ? Look at this, for example;" and he opened an illustrated weekly to the latest trench cartoon of Captain Bruce Bairnsfather.

"It's hard work here," he remarked later. "The worst thing for a man of my years is lack of sleep. I think I haven't slept two consecutive hours in a month. All day I'm on the alert; and at night---well, it isn't so much the bombarding as it is thinking. I lie awake and plan, and wonder what that latest noise may mean. They drop them near-by sometimes, and I get up to see what's happened. They haven't hit us here, as yet!"

One more officer spoke English, and all the rest, save one, French ; so we gossiped ; they were pathetically eager to hear what we had to say of Rome, of Paris, of the prospects for a British drive. The one who had no language but his own was small, chunky, muscular, built like the ideal half-back. Of him the Commander spoke to his face without reserve, since he could not understand, saying:

"He is my adjutant---and that's a soldier! He came up from the ranks. There's his decoration for bravery, and he earned it if a man ever did! He will accompany you to the trenches---if you go."

This introduced a subject which had been very much in my own mind while my lips spoke trifles. On most fronts---the French and German, for example---a neutral correspondent visiting the lines goes over an exact route, laid out in advance. Not so much for philanthropy as to prevent international misunderstanding, the escorting officers play very safe with him. On the Italian front it is different. The escorting officer picks a likely place, with due regard to its sporting possibilities, and asks permission from the officer in command of the district. The escorting officer usually loves his art he wants to take his special set of correspondents where correspondent never went before. He furnishes the sporting instinct ; the officer in command the caution.

"It is quiet now," added the Commander, "but you can never tell when it may begin. This is an uncertain time of day." He whirled in his chair, and faced the Lieutenant, who stood at attention. "You may go, but I will not accept the responsibility. It is on your conscience, Lieutenant, if anything happens."

The Lieutenant's face contracted with some emotion ---probably pride, He chewed a corner of his moustache, then he saluted.

"Very well," he said, "I accept the responsibility."

"Then au revoir," said the Commander, "or rather, au retour! " For a civilian, not yet inured, as a soldier must be, to the imminent fact of death, all this was not reassuring. Then, too, as we picked our way from the approaches of the dug-out, a soldier fell in behind us. He wore a Red Cross brassard, and he was ostentatiously filling his pockets with first-aid packets.

"Buona fortuna !" came in chorus from the officers at the door of the dug-out.

Let me hurry, as our party did, over the intervening terrain. No one, after the capture of Gorizia, can be so blind as to think that Italy has been marking time in this war. But many Europeans believed it then, in April 1916. I wished, as we picked our way over abandoned military works, over broken, rusting, barbed wire entanglements, over neat graves marked on the surface with crosses of field-stones, that such people might see this terrain. For long ago the Italians had crossed the Isonzo against the best resistance Austria could offer, had pushed on through the ruined town where first we saw the shells burst, through the goblin wood, through the château; and foot by foot, impossible position by impossible position, they had wrested two miles of this rocky desert from their enemy. The advanced trenches to which we were going made a fortress of earth and rock on the very crest of the hill.

Now we had begun to descend toward the bowels of the earth; for we had entered a communication trench. It resembled only distantly the trenches of the more Westerly front. It was not a ditch, but rather a passage between walls, made here and there of rough field stones, fitted with the skill of a New England fencemaker, and here and there hewn blocks. It was topped with rows of sand-bags. Now and again, the chunky, muscular little adjutant indicated by voice and gesture a dangerous corner.

"We are tall for the trenches, you and I," said the Lieutenant. He took off his Robin Hood hat of the Alpine infantry, lest its gay, saucy quill, bobbing over the barricade, betray us. We walked on, bent from the hips. Once, the adjutant stopped and pointed, through a peephole in the rough wall, at graves his men had dug and filled under fire---neat little graves with wooden crosses at the head, and field-stone crosses traced on the mound. "He says," translated the Lieutenant, "that our soldiers will risk their lives at any time to bury a comrade, or to put back the cross if it's knocked out by a shell."

Now and then, as we reached a passage where the wall seemed to dip, the adjutant would whisper "presto!" (fast!), and we would stumble over the rough path at a run.

A cannon went off. With a kind of thick emotion I realized that we had delayed in the dug-out too long, for another report followed. Somewhere a rifle whipped and a bullet sang. "Presto!" said the adjutant again. We ran; we rounded a curve and---there was a sharp, a dazzlingly sharp, explosion above us. I jumped and wheeled. Twenty yards or so to our left a shrapnel shell had exploded in the air. It hung there, the smoke of that explosion, a puff of white from which dropped another puff of greenish yellow, a thing as beautiful to see as any coloured rocket.

I was afraid. And this I have noticed about that combination of fear and excitement which comes in great crises of danger---it kills memory. I cannot tell what happened next, but I must have been running close on the footsteps of my guide; for now we were descending a flight of stone steps, cut as true as the steps of a dwelling-house, and we had entered one of those accurately-formed bubble-holes in the earth which they call dolinos. Here and there, on the lower perimeter of its edge, were covered military works. Near us was a bomb-proof. An officer stood at the entrance, and all about him soldiers were rising up and peering out with the sharp, pinched expression of the trenches, exaggerated by the imminent danger. We were introduced, with all due ceremony, to the Captain and his lieutenants. We spoke the trifling language of courtesy, while all our eyes wandered toward the patch of sky outside, where the beautiful bursts of white and falling yellow, broke out with the sharp explosions of giant fire-crackers.

The Captain, remarking that we might not be very safe there, turned his back to read the signs in the heavens. Instantly---for news of unexpected visitors had already been whispered down the trench---the privates crowded round us, saying proudly, one after the other, as by formula:

"I speak English!"

And as by formula, I replied"

"You've been to America, then?"

"Uh-huh!" they answered in chorus. One had worked in Cleveland and one in New York, and---

"To the tunnel, gentlemen! " said the Captain in French " You will be safer there!"

"Presto.'" said the adjutant, and we ran for it-out into the troubled sunlight, up and down steps, along passages between walls of stone and sand-bags. In a little eternity, we reached a dark, round hole, rushed into blackness.

"Give me your hand!" came the voice of the Lieutenant in the darkness. I began to stumble over obstacles. Were they feet ? I put out my hand and felt rifle-barrels and the legs of men, ranged like pillars along the wall. On both sides the tunnel was lined with standing soldiers. Then we saw light from a hatchway far above, and stopped. I called out to Hiatt in English; he responded. Immediately, soft voices came from the darkness and half-light, informing me that their owners spoke English and had worked in America.

We waited a little. There were no more explosions. We pushed on, therefore, through another section of darkness, through a passage lit with full, glaring Italian sunlight, and into a trench, but a trench far different from the elaborate earth-works of the Franco-British-German front. To the rear, it was a cut in the rock, blasted and hewn with a care worthy of more permanent building to the left it was a solid, seven-foot stone wall, with neat loopholes at intervals-plugged, now, with pieces of loose rock. Soldiers, strung along this passage, were digging or drilling, their rifles resting handily against the wall.

The Lieutenant pulled a plug from a loophole and peeped out. No one fired. He motioned me to the loophole, and I took a cautious survey.

Shall I call them sleeping serpents, or just ditches? Merely two lines of rocks and sandbags, very near, with a blasted terrain between. Under the earth in those men waited to die, but they made no sign. From far, from near, I was to see line after line of trenches in the next twenty-four hours, and the thought was always the same: So quiet, so harmless in appearance, those brown stripes across the landscape, yet deadly in effect! Nothing showing, positively nothing but a line of newly dug earth.

Beyond the yellowish ditch which was now the Austrian border, the red hills fell off to a valley; it was a magical vista, greenish-blue near-by, what with April verdure and mist, and blackish-blue far away where the valley met the hills.

Our Lieutenant had been conferring with a captain. He turned back to us.

"The Captain prefers that we should not try the front trenches," said the Lieutenant. "They're only a hundred. yards away, but the passage is long, and though it's daylight there may be an attack coming. In that case, we'd be de trop. Besides, they're no different from these."

We were turning away, when I noticed a soldier making signals with an entrenching tool. He was a little black gnome of a man; a hairy wart decorated his humorously crinkled face.

"Say," he said, twisting his face to get out his somewhat rusty English, "you American, or Eenglis? I work in New York. t come here for the war---"

"And how do you like it ?" I asked.

"Same as my job in America," he said, grinning as he accepted a cigarette---"dig, dig, all the time!"

We were back in the tunnel again ; it was dug, the Lieutenant explained, as we groped our way, to supplant Dead Man's Pass, a piece of military work whose reputation lives in its name. As we stumbled again across feet or brushed against legs, voices began singing, very softly---some Italian impromptu at our expense, I imagine. But the news that we were Americans had already passed down the line for there came soft English---or American--phrases from the midnight walls: "Hello, New York!" "How do you like what us wops is doin' to those Hunkies?" "You newspaper man, huh?" "Take care of yourself!" And finally, from the distance, the old race-track hailing sign: "At-a-boy!" In all that strange day there was nothing stranger than these greetings from my adopted fellow countrymen, whose faces t never saw, and whom, in all human chance, I shall never see even if we all survive Armageddon.

The firing had stopped when we emerged into light; evidently it was just a little episode of the day's work.

The Captain at the dug-out informed us that no wounded were reported, from his dolino at least. With a feeling of leisure and security, therefore, we inspected this pudding-hole and another. Into one ran the ruins of an old trench, broken and tangled barbed wire rusting at its edges. Here, a sign-board nailed to a stick bore an Italian legend which being translated read: "Pass of the Devil." Shoving this trench forward, foot by foot, the Italians had burst finally into the dolino, and taken it, had forced back the Austrians to the crest of the hill. Every man in the detachment which led the final charge was killed or wounded. Somewhere, in this tangle of military works, was a battered dug-out which the soldiers were repairing carefully, methodically. There were fresh blood-stains on the stones; nine men had been wounded here in last night's fighting, they said. And one of the soldiers stopped his work, holding a heavy piece of granite in both hands, to ask us if we didn't come from America and if we knew Detroit? So we passed on, uncomplimented by snipers, to that hillside of abandoned, rusting military works and well-tended graves from near which we had entered the communication trench.

Here, we could see with our glasses one whole sector of the Italian front, a prospect so beautiful that it took imagination to vision a battlefield. The Adriatic was a beam of silver on the horizon; the dark dot at its head was Montfalcone, where the Italian line began.

The prospect rose gently, violet-blue in the background, green in the middle distance, to the red-brown hills on which we stood. There were towns all the way, violet-grey with flashes of red-tiled roof. One had lost by shell-fire its campanile, that bell-tower without which no North Italian town calls itself even respectable. That was the only sign of war-that and the harmless-looking series of brown and yellow threads which, with the glasses, we could trace for miles and miles.

As we neared the dug-out, there occurred a tiny but revealing incident which I feel bound to record, though its hero may not thank me. I had been a little amused at the attitude of brooding care, as over children, which the officers displayed toward us inexpert civilians. We had to pass a certain section of wood in which, I had learned already, there might be danger at any time---when the Austrian guns had nothing better to do, they were always shelling that point. So here we ran for it. As we trotted along, the Lieutenant just in advance of us, there came two sharp explosions, and the dirt flew. Acting as suddenly as the explosive, it seemed to me, the Lieutenant threw himself between me and the danger, thrust me back. It was nothing, as we learned a moment later, but a blast of the trench-makers. But this instant action of the Lieutenant, on behalf of a stranger---we had met only the day before---I shall remember when I have forgotten more fruitful heroisms.

They had luncheon and a glass of wine waiting for us at the dug-out; and the Commander, when we had finished, sent the other officer who spoke English---a captain---to show us the westward view of the line, as it mounted toward the foothills and the Alps. We were going farther toward the mountains that afternoon. He led us to a hill pitted with shell-craters. Some were so old that this year's poppies blew along their edges; some were new and moist. For more miles and miles of hidden struggle, anxiety and heroism, the ditches threaded a landscape changing from gentle to rugged, until their tangled line lost itself in the mountains---or what they call mountains on the Isonzo front. The Alpinists have a different name for them---"hillocks!"

The Captain remarked that this hill got its shellshower every day.

"Here," he added almost casually, ''I became a fatalist. You see," he went on, answering the inquiry in our eyes, "I came up here last month with a good, brave fellow---but new to the front and a bit nervous, of course. He saw these new shell-pits, and asked if we'd better not go. More by way of setting him an example than anything else, I stopped to take a photograph. Just then a shell came. It struck about forty metres down the path---you see the hole there now---exactly where we should have been if we'd started at once. I know now that it will come when it will come. The only way, up here, is to take sensible precautions and then go about your business without worrying!

One's adventures behind the firing-line, as he motors at mad speed from position to position, are entertaining enough, especially among the Italians, with their engaging manners and their quick emotional response. Also, on this front---on any front for that matter---there is a special atmosphere in the zone which just runs the edge of shell-fire. The towns stand, marred only here and there by a long-range shell or an aerial bomb; but the inhabitants are gone. In their place, soldiers wait at the doorways, cluster about the town pump, or sleep in the shade. On the sidewalks, or in the public squares, lie piled the thousand-and-one strange instruments and devices of warfare. Artillery-horses doze or roll under the trees; at a gutter-stream, artillerymen wash harness. In the village blacksmith's shop, soldier smiths hammer out repairs to horse-drawn or motor-driven baggage-wagons, parked in all the vacant lots. Everything that tells of civilian life is dusty, ill-kempt, down-at-the-heel.

This zone, along the Italian front, seemed gayer to me than the same district behind the grim French line. There was a meretricious air of gaiety, indeed, in the very appearance of the soldiery. Visitors to Italy in the old, dead era of peace, always marked the variety of colour and cut in Italian uniforms. War has wiped out the colour; all regiments are dressed now in dull sage-green. But the picturesque cut remains. The carabinieri, those model national policemen, wear still the broad cocked hat, an exaggeration of the headgear which we associate with Napoleon, only they have veiled its black-gold-and-red glory with a grey cover. The bersaglieri, those stout little men who hold the record for marching, have taken to the same colour, but their wide, flat hats, cocked rakishly over the left ear, sport still a cluster of cock's plumes. The Alpini, with their Robin Hood hats decked with one long quill, their wide capes, recall always Howard Pyle's drawings of Sherwood Forest and the Merry Men. So, too, the Italian love of colour breaks out, here and there, through the grey trappings of war---a crude picture on a transport cart, a cockade at the bridle of a cavalry horse. And from the metal chain bracelets from which depend their identification tags, four soldiers out of five have hung those gold or coral luck-charms which ward off the evil eye and keep a man from harm.

All armies sing on the march ; the Germans like a trained choir, the British with good individual voice, but often with ragged team-work, the French, sometimes, with gay enthusiasm. But the Italians alone seem to sing as individuals. Snatches of rich, rolling song drift from the cavalry stables when the troopers are currying their horses, from the artillery parks where the gunners are oiling bores, from the wayside cafés where the infantrymen are enjoying their hour of leave.

Let me, however, pass over our run to the next point of action---our view of Monte San Michele from the ruins of beautiful old Gradisca. We stopped on the way to ask permission ; and that alone brought a contrast of war. We drew up at a stonewall, bordering an orchard, in as peaceful-appearing and pretty a village as one would find in all North Italy. The place seemed deserted and the gardens looked a little unkempt ; nothing but that revealed a state of war. I jumped down, and had started for the corner of the stonewall when our chauffeur, who spoke French, stopped me. It was dangerous there, he said; I found that hard to believe. We walked by ways he seemed to know; suddenly we went down a flight of steps into the ground ; we were in a covered tunnel. We passed through certain other military protective works until ... but the censor would object to further description. Ultimately we reached a certain underground headquarters where we made on the staff the customary demand for information and passes. Often and strangely the North Italian approaches the American in looks. The grave elderly officer who gave us permission to follow our route might have been twin brother to William Dean Howells.

Gradisca, as we travelled swiftly across a dangerous approach, presented a ruined aspect of old beauty. It had been a walled town; war after war, until this one, had spared its noble towers with their square Guelf battlements, its church, its château. Now, it was mostly a ruin. There was then, near Gradisca, a point quite useless for purposes of military observation, but good spot from which to see the positions about this mountain of blood. The ground whore we stood under cover had been seamed and scarred by old battles, and is still occasionally shelled. For the Italians took it trench by trench and house by house in the early fighting; ; they crossed the Isonzo they locked with the Austrians at the foot of that same hill of St. Michael; they forced the enemy up and ever up until he rested at lost on the crest. The double line of trenches, when we visited the Isonzo, ran roughly along that ridge, sometimes over and sometimes a little on the Italian side. It had been a heroic episode in the Italian war. Once a great foreign officer stood not far from our position and watched through his glasses the lines breaking out of their trenches wavering, re-forming, stopping, the new lines coming on, the final rush which took the Austrian positions.

"They are doing the impossible," he said.

But Monte San Michele was a sleeping lion as we looked ---only a reddish-brown blasted hill studded with projecting grey rocks. Yet it was a diagram of an old battle. For the trenches were there still, marking each successive chapter of the history which the Italian officers told us with voice and gesture. To illustrate the story of that fight, one would have needed only a panoramic photograph.

It is a sharp, abrupt ridge, nearly a thousand feet high---what we call a hogback in Western America. It is like a man on his back, with his knees drawn up---only a man wearing a Highland bearskin bonnet, say, or having at least an enormous head. It begins to the left with a little ridge, which is the feet ; it dips; it rises to make the knees; it falls to the abdomen; it rises high for the chest and head. The incredibly blue, sweet Isonzo runs before it.

Under the knees was a little town, half standing; under the highest ridge of the head was a linen factory whose tall chimney had blown no smoke for a year. On the right of this factory began a wood which ran halfway up the hill. It looked green and bright enough until we saw it through the glasses and found that the trees were mere stumps, winch, still living, had put forth their spring leaves. Nature is hard to stop. They call it Bosco Cappuccio, which means Hood Wood and there, they told us, the Italians had done their hardest fighting on this front. They had gone up and up; Hood Wood was blasted in the first autumn of the Italian War. But there was another grove near the crest ; and that might have been a mere clump of poles, for all the verdure it showed.

Far to the left, below the first little ridge of the mountain, stretched a plain, rimmed in the far distance by higher mountains. On this plain lay a town, white amidst the greenery, white too against the blue background of the Alps. It was Gorizia, that key-position of the Isonzo front. All the fighting we had seen and were to see had for its objective Gorizia.

"It's a hard problem," sighed the Lieutenant as we surveyed the town through our glasses. "For it's full of our own people---oppressed Italians." Three months later, by one of the most brilliant strokes in this war, Cadorna solved the problem; Gorizia is with Redeemed Italy.

All this time, artillery had sounded, but so distantly that none of us paid any attention. Now came a sharp blast, and a moment later a spurt of smoke and earth, flame-hearted, leaped from the crest of San Michele. The Italian artillery was firing over us At regular intervals the guns went off, shaking the half-ruined structure on which we stood. Flame and dirt would burst up from the crest ; a few minutes for the sound to carry, and there would follow the crack of the shell. The bursts would become pugs of dust, then mist, then nothing. Suddenly the Austrian artillery began to reply in curious rhythmic one-two-three-four series of explosions. I watched this artillery duel for half an hour; and I saw nothing move or stir on that mountain except the puffs from the shells. Yet thousands of men, armed, brave, dangerous, lay hidden below that deadly-quiet surface.

We made our way back to Gradisca, and through it, with great caution; there was no telling where that Austrian fire was directed. Once, we stopped under concealment of a piazza, covered with a riot of white jasmine; once we lingered to buy from a soldier an intact Austrian shell, whose explosive he had drawn at the risk of his life again we took a little side-excursion to view one of the most complete ruins I have seen in this war. Among the confused items, I remember a place where a heavy shell had dropped at a street corner. It had left a hole perhaps eight feet in diameter, and as perfectly conical as though drilled with some instrument of precision. On a certain main street stood one wall, with appended fragments of floor; this had been a flathouse, I judge; for on the third floor there remained a kitchen sink with a dish-mop and a set of frying-pans, now rusted by a winter's rains, hanging on their nails. There was a window above the sink. The housewife, when she prepared the last meal in that house, had twisted the curtain about the rod to get more light. It was there as she left it, though she was now dead or a refugee. An officer who had joined our party smiled reminiscently as he viewed this wreck.

"My quarters were just across the street,'' he said; "I was in them when that went down!"

We dodged apprehensively through the outskirts of the town. From a house, still standing but windowless, poked the head of a big white-and-brindle mongrel dog. He trotted out, gravely accosted us. His tail wagged feebly, and his brown eyes, as I stooped to pet him, looked up at us with an expression which said:

"Where have the people gone, and what has happened to this town?"

And now, on our way to a lodging for the night and directions to the next position, we saw one of those shows of this war that have been often described and are yet indescribable---a battle to drop an aeroplane.

Sailing out of a notch in the mountains through the sun-mists of a beautiful afternoon, it came toward us, trailing light. Now and then its wings would flash as the belly of a minnow flashes when he turns in the shallows. Before we knew whether it was Italian or Austrian, the firing began. A white puff appeared beside it ; another under it another above. A line of these puff-balls, breaking out suddenly, hanging in air as though caught on an invisible row of hooks, followed it up. And now, one of them hid it from view.

Had the Italians hit ? We waited, to see whether the wreckage would drop; but no ; the adventurer of the air had cleared the puff-only he was sailing back. He tore on unharmed into the cleft of the mountains, the smoke puffs following him all the way. It was a magnificent spectacle. I own, with shame, that not until he turned tail did I realise there was death in it all.

Now the Lieutenant had an idea, which had been crystallizing in his mind all day. Over beyond Pleva, just where the low-hill fighting began to resemble mountain work, lay the House at Zagora. Had we heard of it? There, the Austrians and Italians had rested, all mixed up, for five months---the Italians in one room, the Austrians in another. He was going to take us there---no other civilian, since the line locked, had seen the House at Zagora. "It will be what you call a scoop! " he said, being acquainted with the terminology of London journalism. "I think it can be done," he added. "Of course "---as though thinking aloud-" --I don't want to kill you, but if one of you gentlemen should get a wound, just a little flesh-wound, say, think how much it would do to advertise Italy and freedom! " The fascinating idea rolled up in his mind until it became a decision. It began to fascinate me---and to perturb me, too.

So when we drew up at a certain neat and well-arranged headquarters, the Lieutenant set the adjutant to pulling out maps; and with many an eloquent explosion he traced out the position. There, the Italians had forced the Isonzo---wait until we saw the positions they had taken! The situation, now, centred about that house. The Austrians were in the front rooms, the Italians in the back; from it, the lines branched out not more than ten or fifteen yards apart. He began to talk to the adjutant in their native tongue. One who has studied Latin and French can often catch the drift of an Italian conversation. He was laying out a plan by which we might approach the position that night. The adjutant's face clouded, and he shook his head. Then, on another appeal from the Lieutenant, he got a telephone connection, and talked for some time. "È pericoloso! " I heard him exclaim as he put down the transmitter. Then he explained to us in French

"It is as I thought. In the present situation, that road is not safe for motor cars." He reflected a moment, and sketched out another plan, which involved getting up at four o'clock and taking a climb afoot.

"It will at least give you an appetite!" he said.

So we dined with the Staff. Some spoke English, and the rest French. The talk was of the Italian in America, of art, of our day's adventure, and little, very little of the war itself, except when one grey veteran started a discussion by slamming down his hand and declaring:

"You talk about strategy and tactics; one thing beats them all---barbed wire!"

Then the tongues clattered, and lively Italian gestures flew.

We were quartered on an artillery officer, who lived some distance away. Outside, it was a spring night of the poets. The moon had come up like a great drop of honey. No gun was firing, for once.

"They sometimes shell a position up yonder," said the artillery officer as we walked along. ''I only hope I shan't be wakened by whir-boom!"

After that, we were silent for a while, drinking in the night, and suddenly, in a thicket on the right, a birdsong burst out---a song so lusty, so wonderfully sweet, that I stopped in my tracks.

"Nightingale," said our lieutenant.

Much as I had read concerning the singer of the dewy meads, I had never heard him before---he, the bird of poets and lovers. He sang like our meadow larks of California but the note was higher, sweeter, and infinitely stronger. We had walked on and on, hundreds of yards, before I stopped again. I could still hear him plainly and another one, far down the glen, was answering.

I woke twice that night and listened for the sound of guns. There they were, only very far away. But the nightingales were singing still, near and loud. And so with music the day ended, as it had begun.